. . . which looks disturbingly like a merkin.

Guido Fawkes’s investigations into Labour MP Peter Hain’s undeclared campaign donations and quid pro quo with donors have led him to resign.  More interestingly, this leads Conservative MP Daniel Hannan to consider the pernicious effects of the proliferation of committees and other oversight institutions on Parliament:

We are in a vicious circle: the more people despise their MPs, the more readily MPs acquiesce in the abandonment of their jurisdiction. So frightened are they of taking responsibility that most of them spent yesterday complaining about having to vote on their own salaries.

If they don’t want to regulate their own affairs, is it any wonder that they don’t want to regulate the nation’s? If they lack the confidence to be masters in their own house, is it any wonder that they are tossing away their sovereignty by voting for the Lisbon Treaty?

It all comes down to taking responsibility. These days, almost the first instinct of our politicians, faced with a tricky problem, is to bung it at someone else. Did Peter Hain misbehave? That’s in the hands of the Electoral Commission. When do embryos become human? Let’s ask the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. What drugs should be available on the NHS? Over to you, Nice. Are A-levels easier? One for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. What should we be paid? Let’s set up yet another wretched quango, further devaluing the democratic process. In consequence, elections stop mattering and people stop voting. Ceasing to be authoritative, MPs become contemptible.

What’s the alternative? To make Parliament sovereign, in practice as well as in theory. Forget about whether Peter Hain infracted this or that guideline: the real question is whether he behaved as we want an MP to behave. Scrap the Electoral Commission and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. Make MPs answer directly to their voters.

It is up to all of us to demand honour and decency from our parliamentarians. If we did, they might have to live up to expectations.

Of course, this has no application to we Yanks and our Congress.